Donald Trump and wingnuts in his Republican Party are lobbing racist and misogynistic attacks at the Democratic Party’s new presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris. Will it prove a winning tactic for them?
By Chudi Okoye
With recent events in the country, especially the frightening assassination attempt on one leading party’s candidate and the scrambling of the other major party’s ticket, the uncertainty surrounding the November 2024 US presidential election is greatly heightened. Even so, by enlightened and rational rules of politics, this shouldn’t, in any real sense, be a competitive race. One of the presidential contenders is a relatively young, joyful and delectable woman of color with both Black and Indian heritage who has significant incumbency advantages, being part of an arguably successful administration. She was also a trial attorney who, in her long and lauded legal career, had prosecuted the likes of her opponent: a grumpy old White man with a lengthy rap sheet, a walking crime wave all by himself who has been convicted of multiple felonies, fraud and sexual assault. This felon still faces further criminal charges including his incitement of an insurrection, done to illegally retain power after he’d lost his re-election bid nearly four years ago with a governing record field experts consider the very worst in US presidential history.
If all things were equal, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, who emerged after President Joe Biden decided to abandon his re-election bid, shouldn’t be in what seems a tight race with the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump. But, alas, such are the idiosyncrasies of US politics that the outcome of the November 2024 presidential election remains wholly unpredictable, despite the current buzz around Harris.
I wrote in a recent essay that “in America ideology intersects in intricate ways with deep social currents pertaining to race and ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, disability and class,” and that this intersection of “ideology with overlapping social identities tends to render American politics particularly toxic and volatile…” The intersection of ideology and identity in large part explains why a presidential race which, in my opinion shouldn’t be a close-fought match, at present appears to be.
I chuckle today as I remember a time some years ago, as I got ready to relocate from the UK to the US and a friend, thrilling about the opportunity, told me that I was moving to a country with a vibrant democracy and the “most enlightened citizens in the world.” I was skeptical of this assessment even then, but I know for sure now that my friend had been only half right. America certainly has a vibrant democracy. But I would say that on average, its citizens are a long shot from being the “most enlightened” in the world. I’ll explain.
Scholars have consistently highlighted the incidence of ‘low-information voters’ and ‘low-information signaling’ in America, terms coined in 1991 by Samuel Popkin of the University of California, San Diego. These notions build on the concept of ‘cognitive miser’, developed in 1984 by American psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor who argue that the human mind typically avoids making huge cognitive efforts, preferring simpler explanations for social phenomena and less tasking ways to solve problems.
In a 2017 paper which might be said to reflect this concept, Aaron Dusso of Indiana University talked about “the woefully low levels of political knowledge possessed by the average American,” arguing as follows:
“…democracy is supposed to rest on a foundation of enlightened citizens who not only have the ability to understand the important political issues of the day, but can vote for the candidate(s) that best represent their personal political views. Unfortunately, 80 years of public opinion research has, without exception, demonstrated that the vast majority of Americans do not have this ability.”
I invoke this point in part to explain the cloud of uncertainty that surrounds the 2024 presidential race in America, despite what might look to a rational observer as unambiguous fundamentals favoring the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee.
How does one explain the competitiveness and even, at this point the polling edge, of Donald Trump: a thrice-married man of deep moral failings and no known religious affinity; an obstreperous and vindictive character with a calcified public image as a megalomaniac, narcissist, racist, misogynist, business and political cheat, and above all, a scofflaw who now has a string of felony convictions in his trail, with several pending criminal cases? Answer: dog-whistle and identity politics.
Dog-whistle Rhetoric
American history is dotted with the cynical use of dog-whistles – coded messaging intended for a specific audience, usually White – which are often deeply parochial. It was at play in the Republican Party’s use of racist tropes as part of its ‘Southern strategy’ in the 1950s, deployed to displace the Democratic Party and deepen its own support in the South, as racial tensions built up over the odious ‘Jim Crow laws’ that enforced racial segregation (“Jim Crow” is pejorative, a caricature of African Americans). It was there in the laden phrase ‘states’ rights’, used, again in the 1950s, as code for institutionalized segregation and racism. There was unmistakable dog-whistling and pejoritizing of Blacks as well when, during his presidential campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan referred to “Cadillac-driving ‘welfare queens’ and ‘strapping young bucks’ buying T-bone steaks with food stamps.”
Who can forget the fusillade of racist dog-whistles, innuendos and double-entendres fired at Barack Obama in 2008 when he dared to launch a presidential run? The Republicans and far-right types in the media accused him of being “anti-White” because he and his wife attended a church (of which I’m currently a member) that preached Black liberation theology. At various times they claimed that Obama was not a patriotic American; that he was a drug addict and even a drug seller – a stereotype of Black Americans; and that he was married to an “angry” Black woman who was “ungrateful” for all that America had done for her. One commentator, attempting an even weirder otherization of Obama whom he considered slimmer than average Americans, wondered if he wasn’t “too thin” to be elected president. There was the suggestion that Obama, who was a law professor, was elitist, and that he could never understand average Americans – even though they also derided him as a “community organizer.”
These broadsides against Barack Obama culminated in the frenzied ‘birther’ movement which questioned his birthplace, citizenship status and eligibility to run for president. Claims that he was not eligible to run for president reached fever-pitch, and persisted even though at some point before the 2008 election Obama was forced to release his official Hawaiian birth certificate, duly confirmed by the Hawaii Department of Health. This did not quell the debate over Obama’s citizenship status, which continued even after he’d been elected. This forced the release, finally in April 2011, of a certified copy of his original Certificate of Live Birth, along with contemporaneous birth announcements published in Hawaii newspapers.
I don’t know if Obama ever lived down the humiliation.
It is worth noting that Donald Trump, even though he was not running for president at that particular time, was deeply involved in the birther movement and the assailment of Obama. When Trump did eventually run in 2016, he simply dusted off the dog-whistle playbook, seen most vividly in his repackaging of an old Reaganite shibboleth, “Make America Great Again,” which he deployed as coded nostalgia for an Anglo-Saxon past of White privileging. A key element of that was his xenophobic targeting of immigrants, especially yet-to-be regularized stayers and new border arrivals, at whom he hurled vile and racial slurs, claiming they were “criminals” and “terrorists” flocking to America “with very contagious diseases” and “poisoning the blood of our country.” At different times in 2018 and 2019, in meetings with aides, Trump reportedly asked why border patrols couldn’t simply shoot migrant families seeking asylum below the waist as deterrence! New York Times journalists, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, also report in their 2019 book, Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration, that Trump discussed with aides the idea of building an electrified border wall; and that he even considered digging a water-filled trench at the border, possibly stocked with snakes or alligators! The Times’ reporters write that Trump’s “overarching goal was to make the experience of crossing the border into the United States as terrifying and perilous as possible.”
Trump’s anti-immigrant fulminations, likely borne of resentment at demographic changes in the United States which could further erode White privileging, is a constant of his political rhetoric. He spouted much the same during his failed 2020 bid for re-election, playing the racist and xenophobic card; and he is doing it all over again this year, in his third presidential bid. It is all of a piece with his abetting of Neo-Nazi and White nationalist tendencies, well documented by the media, which nonetheless he does so dexterously as to leave room for plausible deniability.
Kamalaphobia
With the exit of President Joe Biden from the November 2024 election and the emergence of Vice-President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, Trump has wasted no time, as is his wont, slurring his new opponent. He has also created a permission structure for members of his Republican Party and far-right wingnuts to throw mud at the vice-president. They have been making racist and extremely reprehensible sexist remarks about her, in traditional but especially on social media. They have claimed, for instance, that this accomplished woman of color – who comes from a family of academics and was district attorney in San Francisco, Attorney general of California and United States senator, before becoming VP – is dumb as a rock and only attained the positions she did as “DEI hire” (i.e. through affirmative action) and by dispensing sexual favors!
They have targeted Ms. Harris through her Jewish-American husband who is also a lawyer and visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center, claiming that the couple connived with the powerful Jewish lobby in the US to force Biden to step down, and that Biden’s exit was a “Jewish coup.” They call the vice-president “AIPAC slut Kamala,” and her husband a “cuck” (i.e., a weak or servile man whose wife is sexually promiscuous).
They have mocked Ms. Harris for not having a biological child, even though she has stepdaughters through her husband’s first marriage.
They have even started mocking her usually joyful laughter, calling here “cackling Kamala,” a subtle clowning caricature of the type often deployed by mirthless White folks.
The campaign of calumny has commenced, as with Obama, and it may get worse. The goal is to discredit and disqualify Kamala Harris in the minds of voters, not on policy issues but on her identity. This is why the 2024 race is unpredictable, despite favorable fundamentals for Kamala Harris. It is unclear if an uninformed majority in America, lured by racist and sexist signaling, will return to power a despicable White man who was a failed president; or if a majority will summon their better nature, soaring to higher heights to hire an eminently qualified woman of color as president.
Britain, an older nation but younger democracy than America, has had three female prime ministers and even a prime minister of Indian ancestry. America has a chance, if she can but take it, to make history this November.
